With size of the components of the integrated circuits increasingly narrowed, the defects produced in process are very easy to cause problems of product yield drop. For the present, a conventional defect inspection method is using an inspection device to perform inline automatic defect classification to obtain a defect distribution map, and then the defect distribution map is analyzed by experienced engineers.
In the use of the inspection device, users need to set up the information of the various types of known killer defects in advance, so that the inspection device is able to determine known killer defects in accordance with the aforementioned information. However, the inspection device cannot determine the defects of unknown types. Therefore, the conventional defect inspection method lacks of efficiency and is not accurate enough.